KDE refuses to start, part 2

[grg22 at ai.mit.edu (Greg Galperin)]

On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 11:45:04AM -0500, Jeff Kinz wrote:
> No.  KDE is expecting a normal UNIX-style environment.  One of the most basic
> tenets of the UNIX philosophy is "Let the user/program do anything it wants".
> It is the responsibility of the user/program not to do anything harmful.
> 
> An environment with the noclobber option on is a totally different one from
> the normal UNIX-style environment.  It is more, shall we say "VMS like"?

You seem to be saying that as soon as I change any default or set any
environment variable, I'm no longer in a "normal UNIX-style environment,"
and I shouldn't expect anything to work any more.  Surely that can't be so.



> A possible fix would be to find every place in the KDE code which might
> overwrite an existing file and do an rm -f (or its programmatic equivalent)
> on the file prior to writing but I think this is the wrong approach.

Another possible fix would be for bash scripts which require a
particular setting of 'noclobber' to explicitly set it as required.
Given that people do customize their environments, this would seem wise.



> Did you set noclobber because you are worried about using rm with wildcards?

Not speaking for the original poster, I set it because I don't want to
lose a file by redirecting to the same name.  (Does the noclobber
setting affect rm?  How?)


--grg